Certain workpieces in the form of short rods have presented difficulties in handling them or in performing the various operations and inspections involved in their manufacture. These problems are particularly acute in the manufacture of thermometers, especially clinical thermometers where the workpiece is a tube which is not only slippery to handle but also is fragile and contains metallic mercury. These clinical thermometers, when placed in a dispensing machine such as a hooper, tend to jam and resist rearrangement yet their fragile nature prevents their being capable of rough handling to disentangle a jammed assembly in a hopper. Furthermore, the manufacturing requirements of such clinical thermometers require that they be capable of being handled rapidly in order to keep up with the remainder of the manufacturing schedule. The present invention was evolved for the solution of these problems and successfully solves them. It enables the thermometers to be loaded into the hooper in large numbers yet fed therefrom outward one-by-one to a horizontal receiver at a rate of one per second without a jamming rate greater than one thermometer for every thousand thermometers handled.